Dana Fortune’s Technicolor Collages Evoke Nostalgia and Dreams

The technicolor work of Miami-based digital collage artist Dana Fortune combines futuristic environments with vintage models to suggest continuity between the past and future. Rainbows are featured prominently in each of her collages, bringing levity and optimism, or perhaps just a veneer of optimism, to each piece.

Her backgrounds are scenic: galaxies, seascapes, and canyons provide the settings for suburban children, suited gentlemen, and beautiful women. Most of Fortune’s works utilize female models, suggesting continuity between cosmic phenomena and the feminine form. In this way, her works venture into feminism, elevating women to the realm of the celestial.

Her work is simultaneously ultra-modern and nostalgic, where space ships and 1960s style exist side by side. In a way, Fortune’s work continues the promise of progress present in the 60s: a hope for a future of rainbows, space science, and time travel. In one of her works in this rainbow-colored series, Fortune slips in a figure from a heavy metal band inspired by her love for 80s metal music, a seeming contradiction to the dream-like tranquility of her collages.